Affiliate Marketing on RebelMouse: Managing Products

Adam Taylor
Thu, 11 Mar 2021 16:13:43 +0000
Affiliate marketing, Custom entry editor

If you have a website that mixes content with products, you've probably faced the difficulty of incorporating your featured products into your articles. At RebelMouse, we've created an innovative and elegant way to create, search for, and insert your products into your article pages.

The Background

Many publishers on RebelMouse have multiple aspects to their business: content and e-commerce. In the past, we built an Instagram-style e-commerce feature that allows you to feature products within a post, with prices and link outs to sites for purchase, as well as a direct Amazon integration to allow you to insert your affiliate links. Clients like PAPER Magazine have built amazing product pages using just our Layout & Design Tool. Now we've taken this a step further, allowing you to create actual posts that are specified as product posts.

These posts can be standalone product pages, or can be a part of another post. For example, imagine you are writing a post about hiking in the State of Washington in the spring. You'll probably mention that it's often pretty darn wet that time of year! If the e-commerce side of your business has any wet weather boots, you can now seamlessly pull the product post for the boots into the hiking post!

How It Works

We have the ability to customize your Entry Editor to adapt to any editorial needs you have. One of those possible customizations is a product-specific post creation layout.

From this interface, you can easily create a product post, adding in the details for product title, a link out to the purchase page, brand, price, etc. Add in your lead media image of the product along with the other details, and you've got a product post that's ready to publish! If you have an e-commerce section, you can add the product post to it and have it styled as a standalone product for sale.

We can also offer multiple variations of how a product is priced, from a single price, to a full price and discount (or other variant), to multiple versions of a product with their own prices or ranges. Let's imagine a scenario: You have an affiliate marketing program with a boot manufacturer, and they have regular boots and discontinued boots. The discontinued boots will likely be at a much lower price point than the current model. They also might want to add discounts to the boots. All of these things are possible from our Entry Editor. See the screenshot below for how you can add the multiple variants:

Adding a Product Post to an Article

This step goes back to our example of the post about hiking in the spring. Your article may start by describing the mountains in Washington, and then discussing the climate. As we all know, it's rainy up there. So you might segue from talking about how wet it is into a great boot for hiking in the rain. You can use our Product Search from within Particle Assembler to find any of your product posts and insert them as particles in your post. This will take the details already added (as mentioned above), such as price, URL, etc., and seamlessly insert them into your post.

Here's a screencast of how to add products to a post:

Just follow this process while writing your post and add as many products as you need!

Filtering for Products

You can also filter for product posts from within the Posts Dashboard. This will allow you to separate out your article-specific posts from your product-specific posts for ease of finding what you are looking for.

Here's a screencast that shows how to filter in the Posts Dashboard:

Please note that setting up different article types requires a quick back-end update for your site. If you'd like to add article types, please ask your account manager to set that up, or contact support@rebelmouse.com.

How to Create a Product-Based Entry Editor Interface

You can create a custom Entry Editor for adding products as posts by creating a custom Entry Editor for products. From our Layout & Design Tool, this is fairly straightforward. You simply need to add and style a Product Details element. This gives you the ability to add the product URL, brand, price, and sale price to a product post. When you're done styling, simply save the layout and you'll have your product Entry Editor ready to go!

Structured Data on Product Posts

We also make sure that your product posts are correctly wrapped in structured data according to Google's guidelines. This is done entirely behind the scenes by our platform and your editors and tech team don't need to lift a finger to make sure the structured data is correct. This ensures that these posts are seen correctly by Google as product posts, allowing you to gain a pretty impressive benefit from how we mark them up.

In fact, we've seen with our clients that previously had product posts without the correct structured data experience a 20% increase in traffic to the posts once the structured data was set up!

Skimlinks Integration

RebelMouse clients can easily monetize their affiliate links if they have an agreement with Skimlinks. Skimlinks is very easy to implement and it just involves adding your script to our Layout & Design Tool. The script can be retrieved in the Skimlinks dashboard. You simply need to add it to your Top Bar as a JavaScript element, as seen below:

Note: You also need to add this to your AMP page layout:

If you're an existing RebelMouse client and are interested in adding a products layout to your Entry Editor, or just need more details, please contact your account manager or support@rebelmouse.com today.

Not on RebelMouse yet? Ready to take your content creation and e-commerce posts to the next level? Request a proposal to get started!